‘Love’s Comedy’ is in verse, irregular and rimed, well-nigh impossible to render satisfactorily into another tongue.  Ibsen never again undertook to use rime or even meter in handling the manners of his own time.  “I cannot believe that meter will be employed to any considerable extent in the drama of the near future, for the poetic intentions of the future cannot be reconciled with it,” so Ibsen declared in 1883, thus passing judgment on ‘Love’s Comedy.’  And he added that he had written scarcely any verse for years but “had exclusively cultivated the incomparably more difficult art of writing in the even, beautiful idiom of real life.”

It was in 1857 that Bjoernson had put forth ‘Synnoeve Solbakken,’ a mere novelet, it is true, but still the firstling of a native Norwegian literature, reproducing the very accent of the soil; and here we have once more an example of the way in which the novel is now continually affecting the development of the drama, as the play has in the past influenced the evolution of prose-fiction.  For more than ten years Ibsen failed to see how much it would profit him to follow Bjoernson’s lead.  Between ‘Love’s Comedy’ and the ‘League of Youth’ he put forth his two great dramatic poems, ‘Brand’ (1866) and ‘Peer Gynt’ (1867); and even after the ‘League of Youth’ (1869) had opened the series of modern social dramas, he published ‘Emperor and Galilean’ (1873) before resuming his incisive study of the life that lay around him.

The career of Julian the Apostate is sketched in what must be termed a chronicle-play, in two parts and in ten acts, a broadly brushed panorama of antique life, displaying Ibsen’s abundant invention, his ability to handle boldly a large theme, his gift of putting characters erect on their feet with a few swift strokes.  Altho ‘Emperor and Galilean,’ like ‘Brand’ and like ‘Peer Gynt’ was intended for the closet only, and not for the stage itself, it proves its author to be a true dramatist, centering the interest of his story on an essential struggle and keeping in view always the pictorial aspects of his action.

In this chronicle-play, as in his two greater dramatic poems, Ibsen reveals his perfect understanding of the practical necessities of the playhouse, even tho he did not choose always to conform to them.  Then he turned his back on antiquity and faced the present in the series of prose-plays by which he is most widely known to actual playgoers.  He found his characters and his themes in modern life and in his native land; and the social dramas followed one another in steady succession,—­’Pillars of Society’ (1877), ‘A Doll’s House’ (1879), ‘Ghosts’ (1881), ‘An Enemy of the People’ (1882), the ‘Wild Duck’ (1884), ‘Rosmersholm’ (1886), the ‘Lady from the Sea’ (1888), ’Hedda Gabler’ (1890), the ‘Master-Builder’ (1892), ‘Little Eyolf’ (1894), ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ (1896) and ‘When We Dead Awaken’ (1899).